Planning, Executing, Sensing, and Replanning for Information Gathering

Current specialized planners for query processing are designed to work in local, reliable, and predictable environments. However, a number of problems arise in gathering information from large networks of distributed information. In this environment, the same information may reside in multiple places, actions can be executed in parallel to exploit distributed resources, new goals come into the system during execution, actions may fail due to problems with remote databases or networks, and sensing may need to be interleaved with planning in order to formulate efficient queries. We have developed a planner called Sage that addresses the issues that arise in this environment. This system integrates previous work on planning, execution, replanning, and sensing and extends this work to support simultaneous and interleaved planning and execution. Sage has been applied to the problem of information gathering to provide a flexible and efficient system for integrating heterogeneous and distribu..